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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28257 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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"I love Hitler" seems about as literal Nazi as possible.

If serious, then it's proof of LARP.

If that is not "proof of Bad Nazi" to you, what is?

Nothing anymore. I'm in agreement with @KMC. Nazi is a meaningless term nowadays. Back when there was an actual nazi party, you could be a nazi. For a few years after the war, with a network of your old nazi buddies, you could maybe claim to be a nazi. But by now, the term has lost its original meaningful application, and anyone even actively claiming to be a nazi is a joke. Anyone claiming that someone else, someone else who has not just woken up from an 80-year slumber, is a nazi, is either historically ignorant or just complete indifferent. The word nazi, in the 2020s is, and I am very serious about this, nothing but a signal, a target painter, a LASER designator meant to point out POLITICALLY BAD GUY.

Show me the modern nazi. Point him out. And explain to me what it is that makes him a nazi, the true heir to a label that described one political movement and its adherents in 1920s and 1930s Germany, who made up their ideology as they went along. And why that label fits better than "trolling LARPer".

I wasn't the one asked, but... We've got at least two of them right here on the forum. SS being a good example of a modern Nazi. He thinks the Holocaust was a good thing (while also denying its scale).

Alright. Even granting that SS is indeed a bonafide National Socialist who got frozen at the end of WW2 and thawed just a few years ago, and not just a trolling LARPer or an outright schizo, what does that even mean? Is he angling for German racial supremacy, AND the extermination of the jews, AND an infinitely powerful totalitarian autocracy with an extractive party aristocracy, AND militant territorial expansionism AND rapid flip-flopping on modernism VS tradition, AND vigilante anticommunism, AND occasional heavy-handed attempts to regulate the markets...

...or is he just a holocaust revisionist, and that's the label that actually describes what he does, while "nazi" raises more questions than it answers?

Obviously I mean "neo-nazi" when I say modern nazi. Why are you getting wrapped up in semantics around whether it's right to call a holocaust defender a nazi? Pretty dubious move.

Because they're not the same thing. Even our terminology right here is divergent.

A holocaust defender claims that the holocaust was good. A holocaust denier claims that the holocaust did not happen. A holocaust revisionist claims that the holocaust happened other than commonly told. A neo-nazi is an edgy punk with swastikas instead of anarchy symbols. A nazi is a member of the NSDAP, and maybe by association someone who directly collaborates with them. A "modern" nazi would be an ideological national socialist, but good luck pinning that down.

Of course, these distinctions aren't required if all you want to say is "BAD RIGHT WINGER". Then it's indeed all the same.

Nazi = bad.
Nazi apologia = bad.
Nazi apologist =/= Nazi.

The problem with applying the label of Nazi to connote badness is that the charge is so easy to reject on account of the labelled not actually being an actual Nazi (I assume SS isn't a WW2 veteran living in a German care home). It's intellectually lazy. Nazi apologia is bad on its own merits, it doesn't need the laziest boo-light in the world to fortify any criticisms.

Hyperbole and false equivalence are a cancer on discourse, and getting away from that cancer is why I came to TheMotte.

["But isn't 'laziest boo-light in the world' also hyperbole?". No, because I can't think of a lazier one other than maybe "eww, you're smelly".]

When a confirmed neo-nazi can't get away from being called a "nazi", the place has really gone to the dogs...

This is a weird argument, and it's been cropping up a lot lately. It's one thing to argue that as a matter of fact there aren't any Nazis around - it's one thing to argue that the term has been broadened in common usage so as to be useless as anything but an insult - but the idea that it would be impossible for the term to be meaningful anymore? If there was a prominent movement which actually supported applying modernized versions of all core Nazi policies to 2020s America then I don't think it it would be useless or meaningless to call them Nazis. They don't have to prove that they are somehow "true heirs" to the 40s Nazi Party as an institution for that to, in principle, be a useful descriptor of something that quacks and goose-steps like a duck. That would go double if we posit that they explicitly aspire to rehabilitate Hitler and reclaim his legacy. Maybe there aren't any "modern Nazis" outside of a Lizardman's constant, but there could be, it's easy to imagine how that would work and how it would differ from the trolling LARPers we more commonly observe. The obvious comparison is the continued existence of Stalinists, Maoists, or even, like, European royalists in countries that abolished their monarchies centuries back.

Show me the modern nazi. Point him out.

The last real Nazi I'm aware of got a standing ovation in the Canadian Parliament.

Azov? Pretty sure they are indeed trolling LARPers trying to amp up the edgy factor. Which, granted, is something the nazis also did, but that's hardly exclusive to them or essential to nazism.

I'll give you that they can seem somewhat more real if you angle your perspective just right to see some Freikorps or anticommunist parallels...but I'd still call it LARP overall.

I think he means the centenarian SS collaborationist. Famous for being invited to speak at the Canadian parliament as a veteran of WW2 and a fighter for Ukrainian independence against Russia. Allegedly, the people in charge of the ceremony were blissfully unaware of what kind of military formations were conducting Ukrainian resistance against Russia at that time.

Ah, my bad, I should've actually read the damn thing.

Yeah, fair enough, that guy might have been an actual nazi or at least a hanger-on to actual nazis once upon a time.

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